Monday, November 16, 2015

Domestic reaction to the tragic events in Paris this week leaves little doubt
about the decrepit state of American politics. While liberals and conservatives
do not shoot one another, their conflicts are no less anti-intellectual and
insane than the ancient rivalries that are roiling today’s Middle East. The
right decries President Obama’s “pacifism”. The Ann Coulter/Rush
Limbaugh/NRA crowd posit that to end terrorism what the world needs now are
guns, more guns while bigoted Republican Governors in Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan
and Texas assert they’ll close their borders to all Syrian
refugees. On the left, the Internet is full of memes bashing former President
Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney, endlessly re-litigating Bush’s
decision to invade Iraq, and blaming all present and historical ills in the
Middle East on the actions of an early 21st Century American
President.

Sadly, neither left nor the right
have any solutions to the dual foreign policy conundrums of terrorism and the
Middle East’s descent into anarchy. Heroes on both sides have made
mistakes. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq blew the lid off the always simmering
Sunni/Shia conflict and provided a breeding ground for fanatic extremists.
President Obama’s unsure, tenuous policies in Syria and Libya further
destabilized the region and his diplomatic agenda has been lackluster and at
times contradictory. Both left and right were foolhardy in placing too much faith
in the Arab Spring, in which fragile democratic flowers were crushed under the
boots of age-old tribal factions and religious sects.

Both sides have done some things right, too. The senior President Bush defanged
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by deftly building a gigantic multi-national
coalition, and President Obama helped to reduce the threat of a nuclear Iran with
diplomatic aplomb. Yet partisans insist upon a binary world: their team must
always be on the side of the angels, while their opponents must be all evil. In
the convoluted, gray-scale world of foreign policy, that’s a stupid world view.
On this, both the left and right are a Confederacy of Dunces, in which Rush
Limbaugh is no less misguided than a liberal political science professor at an
Ivy League University.

The right are WARMONGERS:
bomb, baby bomb is the only solution proffered. The irony here is
obvious. Bomb baby bomb doesn’t change hearts and minds, regardless of whether
the target is Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq or Syria.

The left offer little more than a
SMUG SHRUG: the solution, we are told, is old fashioned isolationism, ignoring
ISIL and withdrawing within our borders whilst leaving the European Union to
sort it all out, and oh well, terrorism isn’t that big a threat, anyway. The
irony here is that just HOURS before the Paris bombing a Politico investigative
story outlining how Bush and Cheney allegedly ignored intelligence warnings of the
impending 9/11 attack was pounced on by liberal Facebook and blog posts and
by left-leaning cable talking heads. Bush and Cheney failed, it seems, because
they were…um…too isolationist in their dealings with the Middle East.

Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a huge
mistake but we must not forget that Arab factionalism, religious extremism and
fanaticism are not an invention of the United States. The intense hatred
amongst the Sunni and Shia Muslim sects dates from the Battle of Siffin in the year 657, not from the months leading up to September 11, 2001.

Even before the US invasion of Iraq, the Shia, a minority Muslim sect, was
already seething at the hands of Sunni totalitarianism. Much like Europe in the
years before the First World War, conflict was coming. Whether the match that
ignited this mess was ultimately struck by Bush’s missteps in Iraq, the spread
of the Taliban from Afghanistan to neighboring states, the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, or the rapid souring of
the Arab Spring (weakening Sunni Egypt vis a vis a resurgent Shia Iraq) is largely
a moot point. The Arab world is on fire. What we need is a policy to deal with
it.

Since the Paris bombing, the left has
erupted in a Civil War of Words to determine who among them are the most
politically correct. Those who changed their Facebook profile backgrounds to
mirror the French flag are told they are racist, ignoring the pain and
suffering of the victims of terrorist attacks in Lebanon in the days before the
Paris violence. Those flying the French flag on Facebook offer the
counter-accusation of “Grief Shaming." The only common ground here appears
to be racial insensitivity toward the Russian victims aboard the downed
jetliner, who garner zero sympathy from either camp. Newsflash. None of this
online nonsense is any solace to any victim of terrorist violence, and none of it will do a damn thing to promote adult discussions to give us real policy solutions in the real world.

Roughly a week before the Paris
bombing, President Carter published an op-ed in the New York Times on
possible diplomatic solutions in the Middle East. Before the Paris attack
interrupted the methodology, I was running an online test. I posted links to
Carter’s article on 25 randomly selected public liberal forums. On the same day, on the same
forums, I also posted a meme showing Bush and Cheney swinging from a tree. The
Carter link drew a few snide comments, of the smug shrug none-of-this-will-work
variety, while the baboon meme garnered hundreds of gleeful comments (and a
small but lively coterie of right wing trolls). The descent into the
anti-intellectual abyss is pretty much complete on this issue. Not only do
progressives not care to have adult policy discussions, they get snippy if you suggest maybe they should.

You may
say the Internet isn’t the place to make such judgments, that one’s snappy comment
in an online forum or on Facebook or Twitter proves nothing. Then why not
search for commentary from those on the left in reputable newspapers and
journals for proposed solutions? Alas, you see more diatribes and left versus right
sniping. Discussion on Presidential campaign sites, where we should be
discussing issues, are the deepest, vilest cesspools of all. No matter where
one searches, President Carter ends up looking lonely, indeed.

The right, meanwhile, is issuing
racist bellicose diatribes, as a dozen candidates, half of whom likely don’t
know the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam, seek to solidify their poll
numbers in Iowa.

And so it goes. Just one of the hundreds of memes, posts and vitriolic
diatribes on my Facebook feed rang true this week: “For every complex problem,
there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” It’s attributed to H. L.
Mencken, but it was on the Internet, so who knows who said it.